The new breed on the right

he abortion question had to be asked. In a broadcast where the leading Democratic presidential candidates talked about faith, the preachers and CNN producers agreed, it was arguably the single most important issue to America's evangelical voters.

So the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of the Longwood congregation at Northland Church and a strong opponent of abortion, volunteered. He acknowledged Hillary Clinton's pro-choice position but asked whether she could envision any common ground with an anti-abortion community that seeks to reduce the number of abortions "to zero."

Clinton leapt at the opportunity to give her standard response that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare. And, by rare, I mean rare."

The nondenominational minister passed up the opportunity to attack a favorite evangelical target -- and instead, reached out to an opponent.

"Our focus on arguments and opponents is not working," said Hunter, 59, "and it prevents even incremental progress."

It was vintage Joel Hunter. And that's what made him the natural choice to ask such a tough question on national television. In the past 18 months, he has become emblematic of a new generation of evangelical leaders: younger mega-church pastors putting a kinder, gentler face on a conservative religious movement known for strident and sometimes divisive rhetoric.

Since the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Hunter has become a face in this emerging cohort. He has been cited in front-page articles in The New York Times and Washington Post, in op-ed columns in the Los Angeles Times, and he has been interviewed by National Public Radio, BBC programs, CNN and ABC's Nightline.

Hunter's provocative book -- Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians, which was published by the church -- has been picked up by a commercial publisher and will be rereleased next year.

But it will have a different title: A New Kind of Conservative.

"Hunter exemplifies the New Guard of American evangelical leaders," said Jeff Sheler, author of Believers: A Journey of Evangelical America. "This is a group of successful pastors, mostly, who are more centrist and less partisan than the Old Guard of the Religious Right, and who present a more winsome and moderate face of evangelical Christianity."

A wider range of issues

In Hunter's church, there is no fire and brimstone.

Instead, the message and the presentation are the same: clear, practical, reasonable, upbeat and Bible-based. Hunter's success in the Sunbelt is an anomaly in some ways. He is a funny, folksy Midwesterner in a congregation that is largely Southern. A Hoosier, he is a storyteller as much as a preacher, often using self-deprecating anecdotes.

"I don't want to bore myself," said Hunter, a compact, energetic man with a reflexive, sometimes impish smile. He reads widely and deeply, including publications such as The Economist and Foreign Affairs.

Hunter and others in this new breed of church leaders want to push the evangelical agenda beyond the traditional opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. They endorse those positions but also want to be involved in the national dialogue about immigration, global warming, AIDS, war and peace, the genocide in Darfur, human trafficking and concern for the poor. Hunter also opposes the death penalty.

And, he does not want the Republican Party to take for granted the evangelical vote.

In the 2008 campaign, the conservative Christian vote will be a "jump ball," Hunter said, especially if the choice in the voting booth is between faith and competence. "If it's not possible to have both, you go for competence every time."

Experts disagree whether mega-church pastors such as Hunter, T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren are leading their flocks or simply understanding that many worshippers now appreciate a more toned-down approach.

"Clearly Rick Warren and Joel Hunter are trying to put a new public face on American evangelicalism," said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. "That is, a faith that isn't predictably knee-jerk right wing, that wants to look at a wider range of issues."

The Rev. Jim Wallis, of the liberal Sojourners community, said the pastors are responding to "dramatic changes in the evangelical world, especially in the younger generation."

And that generation, more than others, cares about the environment, global warming and matters of war and peace.

Until recently, the national evangelical leadership included those who denied the scientific consensus that global warming exists. They rejected the notion that climate change is primarily a result of human activity and feared that significant remedies would cost too many jobs.